Social Media Analysis Highlights Ideological Showdown Between Rahul Gandhi’s Congress and Shashi Tharoor

An extensive analysis posted by X user “Civitas Sameer” on Sunday framed the ongoing discord between Congress leader Shashi Tharoor and the party’s current direction under Rahul Gandhi as a “contrast between two ideological tendencies,” arguing that the party is failing due to its “inability to choose, integrate, or execute either, coherently”; Tharoor, who recently skipped a third consecutive major party meeting, responded to the analysis, calling it “thoughtful” and “fair,” while acknowledging that the party has always had “more than one tendency”; the analysis posited that the Congress’s post-2010 shift to a “rural grievance-driven mass party” stands in contrast to Tharoor’s “urban-facing, institutionally oriented, and reform-compatible Congress,” a tendency associated with past leaders like P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh; the X user heavily criticized the Congress for repeatedly sidelining these “urban technocratic leaders” (citing examples like Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot), suggesting that the party is currently neither a credible urban reformist party nor a serious rural mass party, resulting in an identity that is merely “oppositional (and) not aspirational.”